The 2012 Story

During a break in the afternoon I bumped into Aveni in the foyer. He said, “Oh, you’re here—you sent me your six points and said you weren’t coming!” This was indeed true at the time I’d sent them to him. I should mention that Aveni and I appeared in a recently released documentary together, called 2012: Science or Superstition? I’ve had serious issues with many of the documentaries I’ve been involved in, some of which micro-edited my words to make it seem as if I advocated the 2012 doomsday position (if I had a team of damage-control spin doctors, or could afford lawyers, they would have been on that right away). But the new documentary really did a nice job of accurately treating my work while providing reasonable critiques. These were provided by Aveni, and I could see that he was willing to address the question of the galactic alignment. His Tulane talk covered much of the same ground as his comments in the documentary.

Harvey Bricker gave a long introduction, with funny slides taken during vacations they had shared and satirical jabs, all in good fun. He called Aveni an interdisciplinarian who was the perfect person to address the 2012 topic. I was a bit surprised at the constant humorous references to “end of the world” ideation, as if that was all it was about. It seemed that scholars were just as imprisoned by that doomsday framework as the media and many popular writers were.

Aveni began right off with his Google results for “Maya 2012 Creation”: 281,000 hits and growing by the month. It was, indeed, “a very hot topic.”⁵³ He said he wanted to discuss the “event” that “will occur” on “the winter solstice of 2012” from three vantage points: what latter-day prophets are saying about it, what it might have meant for the Maya, and what cycle turnings generally mean and have meant for cultures.

He mentioned Geoff Stray’s website but called it “Dire Gnosis” (the crowd tittered); Geoff’s site is actually Diagnosis2012.co.uk, and he tells me that he originally had the logo read “Dire Gnosis” as a pun. Realizing that some people were taking it literally, he explained on his website that “there is a whole complex of meanings wrapped up in the Dire Gnosis logo… The word DIRE, although it can mean calamitous; dreadful; ominous, can also have a meaning of URGENT as in ‘dire need.’ Thus, the words 2012: Dire Gnosis mean 2012: Urgent Knowledge.”⁵⁴ Stray’s website has been the go-to resource for all things 2012, providing detailed critical reviews of many books, theories, and movies. More so than any other investigator, including Aveni and myself, Geoff has been tireless is providing clear, informed, careful, and accurate reviews of almost everything that has appeared on 2012.

Aveni read from the jacket blurbs of books by Lawrence Joseph and Daniel Pinchbeck. He allowed various popular writers to indict themselves with their own statements, and it’s true that the hyperbole in Pinchbeck’s writings as well as Lawrence Joseph’s book is easy to spot. For example, Joseph wrote that 2012 will be “more catastrophic, tumultuous, and revela tory than any other year in human history—it will make you think twice about your retirement plans.” And he quotes Daniel Pinchbeck as writing that his metaphysical opus reveals “secret thoughts on suppressed dimensions of being embedded in Maya 2012 philosophy that can save the world from impending environmental disaster.”

We might suspect that Aveni chooses the most outrageous selection, guaranteed to entertain his audience. It’s an old modus operandi that harkens back to Eric Thompson’s treatment of Benjamin Whorf, taking the weakest points and “worrying them to death,” as Michael Coe said. But I’m not surprised that pop writers get this treatment from Aveni, because of late there’s been a tendency to do very little actual research into Maya traditions. It’s as if a subparadigm has been created that can just quote mutually supporting New Age sources. Or 2012 just gets adopted as a pop icon, removed from its roots in Maya tradition. For researchers, writers, and journalists, there’s actually a lot of fascinating Maya source material to sink their teeth into.

Aveni then came to my work, and mentioned that I was in the audience and provided him with a list of six essential points, joking that he was glad to have me on his dissertation committee. Aveni’s genuine sense of humor alternated with no-nonsense observations. “Jenkins,” he said, believes “the Maya knew the winter solstice sun was slowly moving toward the center of the galaxy and when it passes the galactic plane we too will connect with our cosmic heart.” He mentioned my emphasis on the dark rift as a birthplace and my interpretation that the Maya conceived the Galactic Center as a “womb of creation.” So far so good, but then he said that I believe “this is all recorded on Stela 25” (from Izapa). He belabored the image as my proposed key to the alignment, which it isn’t, then he correctly pointed out that I see it as encoding an oppositional relationship between the Polar Center and the Galactic Center. Stela 11 is the carving from Izapa that I’ve presented as an image of the alignment of the December solstice sun with the dark rift in the Milky Way, for reasons I explained in Chapter 4. Without really passing judgment, Aveni quickly moved on to his next subject.

Next he quoted Lawrence Joseph saying that “the world will be thrown out of kilter” on December 21, 2012. A full-course menu of catastrophic scenarios was laid out by Joseph in purple prose that would give Poe pause. In a CNN interview, Joseph claimed his book wasn’t really cataclysm oriented, that his publisher insisted on the alarmist title (Apocalypse 2012), but his own words sure give the impression that he had doomsday on the brain.⁵⁵ Aveni next reported that Dr. Calleman believes “the harmonic coincidence attending the seminal moment will constitute nothing less than a spiritual awakening, an enlightenment that demonstrates the progress of evolution.” The “seminal moment” for Calleman comes not in 2012 but on October 28, 2011, according to his system.

The second area that Aveni wanted to address involves what people believe the Maya may have thought about 2012. He says these ideas can be criticized on astronomical and cultural grounds. On astronomical grounds, he claimed there was no evidence they were aware of precession. Apart from the evidence at La Venta and Tak’alik Ab’aj that I previously mentioned, there is now breakthrough information from MacLeod and Grofe, which Aveni glossed over disparagingly. He ran through some quick comments on the eclipse table in the Maya’s Dresden Codex, the use of Copan ruler 18 Rabbit’s double-serpent bar, and described Long Count numbers going into the deep past on Copan Stela B. He stated that these were “not forward-looking ideas but backward-looking ideas, connecting rulers into deep time,” making a point that the Maya did not look into the future. However, in the Tortuguero texts as well as at Piedras Negras and even in the corpus of texts from Copan he mentioned, future cycle endings are in fact frequently referenced. For example, Copan’s dated inscriptions project backward and forward, making calendrical analogies between Yax Kuk Mo’s fifth-century reign and the future close of Baktun 10 (in 830 AD).⁵⁶

On cultural grounds, he said the ancient Maya weren’t forward-projecting. In fact, they did use both forward and backward projections in their Creation Texts. Many scholars, such as Matthew Looper, understand quite clearly the analogical relationship between the period ending of the previous World Age (in 3114 BC) and other period endings, great and small, throughout Maya history: “Zoomorph P and Altar P’ [at Quirigua] were commissioned by Sky Xul as the primary commemorative monuments for his third period ending festival on 9.18.5.0.0 [September 13, 795 AD]. As a celebration of cosmic renewal, the period-ending was considered to be a replay of the events of cosmogenesis, which occurred on 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u [13.0.0.0.0 in 3114 BC].”⁵⁷ All cycle endings would have been treated as like-in-kind events in which sacrifice and new dedications were performed.

Next, Aveni claimed that the Milky Way was never represented by the Maya as a tree, an opinion that many Maya scholars simply don’t agree with. The Lacandon Maya, to give just one example, believed that the clump of the nuclear bulge where the Milky Way crosses through Sagittarius and Scorpio was the “roots of a giant tree.”⁵⁸ Aveni produced the famous image from the last page of the Maya Dresden Codex, which shows a flood pouring over the earth from the mouth of a giant sky-caiman. He compared this flood image to prognostications given in the Chilam Balam books, and Aveni believes these “prophecies” are simply free-floating “metaphorical frameworks”—sort of like moral guidelines—rather than “transcendent” messages that would apply to all humanity as some kind of universal truth. Again, one senses a resistance to accepting the archetypal dimension of the human psyche that does offer a “universal” or “transcendent” level on which these kinds of ideas have meaning. The idea of a cleansing “flood” is not only a universal occurrence geographically speaking, but more important it is a universal (in Aveni’s conceptual usage, “transcendental”) idea that has meaning for each and every human psyche—death itself will be the great flood.

Aveni stated that in the early days of Christianity, a religion he calls “Gnosticism” prevailed that believed in an essential unity of all faiths. He opined that such a view is outdated, a kind of idealistic superstition that should not be entertained today. He was, I think, trying to describe the Perennial Philosophy, which is not so much a historical phenomenon as a depth perception that acknowledges the underlying essential unity of religious teachings, at their archetypal core, while the exoteric forms and dogmas of religion always appear in changeable garb. This is an essential unity that transcends formal differences, best understood through initiation into a level of consciousness that can integrate the superficially different exoteric forms by seeing their shared root. Direct